True Colours
by Andraste
Summary: Henry McCoy confronts the difference between truth and beauty. Slash, XavierBeast.


Disclaimer: Henry McCoy and Charles Xavier belong to Marvel Comics, not to me.  
  
Rating: PG, at worst. This is Charles/Hank which might bother some people, but it uses current comic continuity – Beast stopped seeing Xavier as a mentor figure a long time ago, and I don't think he ever thought of him as a father in the first place.  
  
Continuity: This is set in some indeterminate post-Morrison future, ignoring everything that's happened since NXM#154 or so. Not that it really comes into the story.  
  
True Colours  
  
By Andraste  
  
The most surprising thing about the astral plane was its multiplicity of colours and lights, and the astonishing patterns they created. From his limited previous experience, Hank had come to associate the psychic realm with telepathic skirmishes and the nefarious plotting of the Shadow King. He hadn't expected it to be so beautiful.  
  
The radiance was bright enough that it should have hurt to look at; brighter than the sun or even the unveiled stars he had seen outside the protection of Earth's atmosphere. Fortunately, he was not seeing it with his eyes.  
  
He almost asked Charles to stop pulling a landscape out of the chaos, to allow the elements to metamorphose in the ether without the illusion of directions or gravity to contain them. Yet the immediate prospect of union with Charles Francis Xavier always made him abandon his customary verbosity to quiet contemplation. If he was being entirely honest, he was nervous – which was why they had repaired to the astral plane in the first place.  
  
Charles had explained to him, in a patient tone that reminded Hank of their previous relationship as teacher and student, that sex on the astral plan was not like sex in the material world. Eyes were not the only thing that became lost in translation. Senses were oddly transformed, altered by the psychic environment, and some sensations barely translated at all. Nevertheless, Henry had agreed to try it with alacrity, for a number of reasons.  
  
It was ... challenging to make love to someone you had thought of as a mentor for almost half your life. More difficult still when he was a paraplegic and you were a creature with paws that could break him all too easily if you made a mistake. Charles had never been frail, but Hank was appalling conscious that in his outsized hands any person lacking enhanced strength or invulnerability was easily broken.  
  
He realized now that the opportunity to watch his lover weave a cosmos out of nothing would have been incentive enough to come here. As he waited quietly, Charles moved his half-drawn hands absently, rendering the abstract objects 'd art of the plane into grass, trees, a sky that was beyond blue. Tilting his head to one side, he seemed to reconsider the last choice, and in a moment the arc above them darkened and filled up with unfamiliar stars. All of it looked not merely real, but _hyper_-real; much like its architect.  
  
In the material world, no-one looked at Charles Xavier very much unless he wished them too, and if they did what they saw was a bald head or a wheelchair. Perhaps the sharp cobalt eyes, if they were unlucky enough to be pinned down and examined. Here, he was blue all over, glowing and strong, and now slowly transmuting into convincing rendition of a human being as Hank watched. Still beautiful, still breathtaking.  
  
"Has anyone ever told you that you are divine in this place?" Hank heard no trace of irony in his own telepathic voice. "You make me feel like Semele."  
  
Charles smiled, and he found himself surprised that he wasn't blinded by that – there were some things mere mortals weren't mean to see. "This is where my strength is found, Henry. And yes, people have told me that strength translates itself into beauty."  
  
Still smiling, he gestured in Hank's direction, solidifying his amorphous astral form. Even as he did so, his smile slowly altered into a frown.  
  
Hank held his breath in lungs that he knew were only the platonic ideals of lungs. He stood revealed as a man – no glasses, no fur, no gargantuan extremities. Just a moderately attractive human being of average human size.  
  
"Henry," Charles said tentatively, "I have explain before that I accept you for who you are ..."  
  
Letting out his breath in a long sigh, Hank wondered how to admit aloud what he seldom admitted to himself. "I am sorry if this upsets you, but I did not come here merely to ease your discomfort. I, too, find myself somewhat tense about sexual union in the physical world."  
  
"Henry," his lover said gently, with a tone that was warmer and held more pain than anything he had ever used on his students, "I am sure that others have told you that your appearance is immaterial."  
  
All at once, he felt something snap. The thing that defined his very existence, of no import? "This _is_ what I truly am! The fur, the claws, they matter to _me_! They make _me _uncomfortable! I can accept that you must put your cause before our happiness, but I will not pretend that this is not my real self for political reasons!"  
  
"I don't understand why –" Charles sounded upset rather than angry, and that was unusual enough to take much of the sting out of his rage.  
  
"This is who I am, in the sanctum of my own mind," Hank said, continuing more calmly. "There are people who would criticise you for failing to include your disability in your own internal self-image - yet you stand here whole and able."  
  
Charles shook his head. "I am sorry Henry. That I questioned you, and that you feel that way. That the world is such that you feel that way."  
  
This was not a path Hank wished to continue down. Talking politics almost invariably ruined Charles's interest in sex. Of course, his outburst had probably already accomplished that. "I honestly believe in your dream, and I have fought for it, mind, body and soul since I was little more than a child. But do you truly blame me for wishing that things were otherwise, in my heart?"  
  
"No, Henry. No, I don't. I won't even lie to you and say that I have never wished something similar for myself."  
  
Reassured, ever so slightly, Hank looked up at dark sky above them. This world, at the least, seemed beautiful and whole – even if it was only an illusion of beauty and wholeness. "Do the constellations up there have names? No, wait – don't tell me. Show me. I want to see the place you inhabit from the earth to the stratosphere; insofar as either exist.  
  
Charles held out a hand for him to take, and Hank revelled in the sensation of squeezing it tightly with his own. Here, truth was beauty, beauty was truth, and that was all he needed to know.  
  
The End 


End file.
